Drive East Olentangy Street on a Tuesday afternoon and you will hit a rooftop bar with a Hawaiian name, a restored hundred-year-old house full of people on laptops, and a sidewalk that was poured this year. Turn around and drive West Olentangy, past Village Pointe Center, and you will find a restaurant still finishing its interior while it serves weekend buffet out of a kitchen it inherited from the last tenant. Same street name. Same downtown Powell development push. Two completely different points on the calendar.
That gap matters if you live here, because it is easy to read "Powell's downtown is transforming" as one story with one finish line. It is not. One half of that story is done and staffed. The other half is still a soft opening and a line item on a city council agenda. Knowing which is which changes where you actually go this month.
The east end already crossed the finish line
COhatch's Powell campus at 50 and 60 E. Olentangy St. opened this spring after breaking ground in late 2024, and it is the company's 38th building restoration project nationally. The 14,000-square-foot mass timber building holds coworking space, private offices, and meeting rooms, and it sits next to the restored Middlebury Member House, a converted historic home that started welcoming members in May. On top of the whole thing is Lani Rooftop Lounge, a Hawaiian-inspired indoor and outdoor bar with a menu built by chef Quichocho Lingo and cocktails from Alex Johnson, open to the public and available for private bookings.
The city says the project supports close to 200 jobs and roughly $1.5 million in annual payroll once it's fully running. COhatch CEO Matt Davis has lived in Powell for more than two decades and raised his kids there, which is part of why the opening got framed as a homecoming rather than just another location. The public infrastructure around it, new sidewalks, added on-street parking, utility upgrades along East Olentangy, went in alongside the building itself, so the street physically looks different than it did two years ago, not just the storefronts on it.
That side of downtown is done. You can book Lani for a Friday night right now. You can walk into the Middlebury Member House today. There is no soft-opening asterisk on any of it.
The west end is still becoming itself
Walk into Khaab Indian Kitchen & Bar at 230 W. Olentangy St. right now and you are technically walking into a space that used to be Doaba Indian Restaurant, because that is exactly what it still partly is. Khaab, the upscale Bexley restaurant known for Punjabi-inspired dishes and a full cocktail program, announced its Powell expansion this spring with a spring opening target. Owner Dalbir Mavi told local reporters he was hoping for a soft opening in April or May. As of now, the Powell location runs a Friday-through-Sunday buffet while the promised interior transformation, the one meant to bring the full Khaab look and menu to Powell, is still described on the restaurant's own site as coming soon. Early customer reaction is split. Some reviews call the food the best Indian they have had in the area. Others miss Doaba's lower prices and say the new operation runs noticeably more expensive for a similar dish list.
That is not a complaint about Khaab. It is a fact about timing. If you go expecting the finished Bexley-style dining room, you are going to a restaurant that has not fully arrived yet.
Meanwhile, the rest of that side of downtown moved faster, just on an earlier clock. Liberty Social has been running since April 26 last year at 240 N. Liberty St., in the space that used to be Gallup's Bar & Kitchen, with a two-level, 240-seat layout, full lunch and dinner service, and weekend brunch. It is proof that this corridor can finish a project cleanly, on schedule, no asterisk required. And in mid-August of this year, Cava opened a location on Sawmill Parkway, expanding a national fast-casual chain that only entered the central Ohio market a few months earlier with a Hilliard Rome Road location.
So the west side of downtown has one restaurant that finished more than a year ago, one national chain that just landed this month, and one upscale reboot that is still mid-transformation. Three different stages of done, all within a few blocks of each other.
The corridor that's still just a proposal
There is a third piece of this that has not been built at all yet. A developer called Transform Construction submitted plans for a two-story restaurant at 147 W. Olentangy St. and a three-story building at 173 W. Olentangy St. that would combine another restaurant, retail space, and a 16-room boutique hotel. The combined investment comes to about $7.8 million, and the numbers were laid out at a Powell City Council Development Committee meeting on November 5, 2025.
The city is weighing 75% property tax abatements over 15 years for both sites. Based on that presentation:
- The developer would save roughly $190,000 on the restaurant project and about $1.5 million on the hotel building over the abatement period.
- The two projects combined are projected to support more than 70 full-time jobs and bring about $1.95 million in new payroll downtown, generating around $39,000 a year in payroll taxes.
- If the hotel runs at full occupancy, the development team estimates it could generate close to $1.9 million a year in visitor spending, based on the Ohio Department of Development's estimate that an overnight visitor spends about $327 a day, which works out to roughly $28.7 million in economic activity over 15 years.
Economic Development Administrator Sean Hughes explained the reasoning behind adding more restaurants to a downtown that already has several in progress:
"Why more restaurants? Quite simply, it's because our residents want them. They want to see more choices and restaurants here in our downtown in particular, and Powell in general."
That is the honest version of where this piece of downtown stands. Nothing at 147 or 173 W. Olentangy is under construction. It is a proposal with tax figures attached to it, discussed at a committee meeting, not a building you can walk into this fall.
What's actually on your calendar this month
Set the construction timeline aside and downtown Powell still has a normal, working fall schedule that has nothing to do with any of the above.
The Powell Street Market & Business Expo runs Sunday, September 13, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in downtown Powell, with more than 60 local vendors and proceeds benefiting the Powell-Liberty Historical Society. It is the kind of event that has run for years regardless of what is or is not finished on Olentangy Street.
Nocterra Brewing just wrapped its 11th anniversary weekend, which kicked off in Powell on August 24 with food trucks running Tuesday through Sunday and a run of anniversary releases. The brewery's Run Club still meets every Thursday at 6:15 p.m., partnering with Columbus Running Company for a group run that ends back at the taproom and beer garden, open to any pace or distance.
None of that depends on whether Khaab finishes its interior or whether the boutique hotel proposal clears its next council vote. It is just what Thursday and the second Sunday of September look like here right now.
The actual takeaway
If you have heard that downtown Powell is having a moment, that is true, but it is several moments running on different clocks. The east end, COhatch, Lani, the Middlebury Member House, is finished, staffed, and open for business tonight. The west end is a mix of ages: Liberty Social has been open for more than a year, Cava just landed this month, Khaab is real but not finished, and the 147/173 W. Olentangy project is still just numbers on a committee agenda. Knowing the difference is the difference between planning a Friday night around something that exists and planning it around something that is still, for now, a rendering.
If you're watching what's happening on Olentangy Street because you're also thinking about what it means for your own address in Powell, whether that's timing a sale, sizing up a purchase, or just understanding how downtown's momentum might affect your street, Greg Giessler and Cam Taylor Realtors know this market block by block. Get your free home valuation and talk through what it actually means for you.
